// Eröffnung: 18. Mai 2007, 19h

// Dauer: 19.5.–3.7.2007

// Opening times: zu Veranstaltungen und n.V.

Wolfgang Mayer zeigt in der Loge von General Public eine Installation seiner Skulpturen "Make-Up-Box“ und "Make-Up-Box 2". Wolfgang Mayer bildet zusammen mit Christina Gomez-Barrio das interdisziplinäre Kunst- und Performance-Projekt Discoteca Flaming Star.

> www.discotecaflamingstar.com

Alena Williams Glass

At one time glamour, performance, staging was an apparent misreading of modernism; according to critics like Michael Fried minimalist sculpture’s greatest failure was its direct engagement with the viewer, its foregrounding of phenomenological concerns, its awareness of context. Somehow this is an unwitting, critical point of departure for the work of Wolfgang Mayer, which is above all a performative project that finds its expression in words, line and form. In 1999, he built three objects covered in a fabric of mirrors: a tall rectangle on its side, a shorter cube, and a small box that emitted a fragrance into the surrounding space. A number of aesthetic transgressions took place with their use. To begin with, the large object’s exclusive use as a stage for three drag queens invalidated its own designation as “sculpture” before it could even be co-opted into the institutionalized structure. Secondly, the very use of a reflective surface, much like Morris’s mirrored cubes, denied the existence of the object, at the same time that it made the viewer’s relationship with the object plain. This recalcitrant gesture is furthered by his adoption of the material of the mirrored ball for their surfaces, a gesture that was only possible much after the demise of modernism, and long after the last days of disco.

In Mayer’s work, this interest in mirroring is reiterated in solo performances and collaborative projects carried out with vanity objects, moveable, mirrored screens, and make-up cases—ultimately taking shape as an interest in reflection and self-reflection. By donning a range of elegant costumes and make-up, he seems to be constantly engaged in a performance of self, and even a search for the limits of self. In many senses, the world is considered to be a reflection of the mind— in Heideggerean terms, it is a kind of ‘world picture,’ which it can be reorganized, refashioned, shaped. Rather than reflecting light, the world of glass depicted in a series of black and white photographs, which Mayer took of chandeliers and projected as 35mm negatives, becomes beautifully altered; the materiality of reflective surfaces take on all new properties. As Rancière asserts, politics is a kind of aesthetics because politics is a “configuration of a specific world, a specific form of experience in which some things appear to be political objects, some questions political issues or argumentations, and some agents political subjects.” Rather than accommodate the current conditions, you can simply obliterate it and start again. Perhaps this point is no more clearly demonstrated than in his black and white video `Mirror Ball II’ , in which he records the object’s disintegration in slow motion as he drops it to the floor before the camera. What is a reflection but an imagination of the self?

This leads us to the myriad of citations that can be found in the drawings that Mayer has produced over the past years. Reproductions of printed pages from texts by Woolf, Camus, Barthes, and Machevelli among others, are drenched in watercolor, dismembered into smaller syntactical units, and then reorganized on to the pages of a drawing blatter, coalescing around one another while suspended in a translucent paste. In one series of drawings, he worked from Hilter’s Mein Kampf, one of the ultimate representations of self-actualization, as a means of coming to terms with historical facts, also with what the assertion of self can mean in relation to the world.

Particularization also represents a critical aspect of this endeavor. Not only do his drawings represent an aggregate encapsulation of critical minutiae and literary fragments, but they also serve as a kind of transcription of thoughts, dreams, poetry—a simple deliverance of thoughts into form. To be sure, the artist’s choice of texts is not simply arbitrary, but what presents itself as being the most interesting about these texts is the various modes of production they have initiated in Mayer’s practice. Eventually, dissection, disruption, dispersion across the printed page gives way to spiraled rationality, finding its locus point in many of the drawings’ circular centers. It is a kind of rationality that can only be arrived at in repetition, by means of repetition; the drawings represent a process of occlusion and appearance through language that is rehearsed and performed again and again. (No where else is this best carried out than in his `Je t’aime (BB-SG-JB)’ , in which two recorded tracks of the classic song are played simultaneously over and on top of the other). The inverse almost seems to be true in his recent series of floral drawings, which take their cue from the early Western representations of botanical phenomena. Here, the processing of the materials takes precedence over what might be literally read in the image. Coherence emerges from dissimilarity, and generates a kind of wild, brute materiality—blocks of neatly handwritten texts serve to caption images, the text-collaging of which gives them the appearance of semantic whirlwinds scattering over the surface of watercolored flora in deep reds, oranges, pinks, and yellows.

This activity marks yet another productive direction in Mayer's work: it is a new kind of organicism that reflects the world's material base.

X---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- See Jacques Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics” (2003). Paper presented at the conference ‘Fidelity to the Disagreement: Jacques Rancière and the Political’, organised by the Post-Structuralism and Radical Politics and Marxism specialist groups of the Political Studies Association of the UK in Goldsmiths College, London, 16-17 September 2003. homepages.gold.ac.uk/psrpsg/fidelity.html